There are some franchises that just endure. Star Wars; Indiana Jones; The Lord of the Rings – some stories we just can’t help but fall in love with over and over again. Magic: The Gathering’s Universes Beyond expansions aim to bring those to cardboard life and, while they’ve seen some serious peaks and troughs in quality, Wizards of the Coast is undeniably swinging for the fences with the massive settings it’s taking MTG to. It’s just Magic-ified The Hobbit, one of my most beloved novels. Next on the list is Star Trek, another childhood favorite of mine and, as it so happens, one of Principal Magic Designer Gavin Verhey‘s, too.
“Working on [Star Trek] really was a dream come true for me,” Verhey tells me at Gamescom. “I started watching Star Trek when I was like, eight years old maybe? I started playing Magic when I was ten, so it even precedes that! I fell in love with it, and I feel like Star Trek really shaped me as a person, from the discussions and moral quandaries, to the sense of exploration: they’re all things that I embody now.”
The incoming MTG set‘s release coincides with Star Trek’s 60th anniversary, with Verhey noting that it “packs in all 60 years. Whether you love the original series or the new stuff, it’s all there, which I think is so fantastic.”
Speaking at Gamescom 2026, I got to pick Verhey’s brains on all the ways MTG Star Trek is looking to gamify the series’ unique stories and characters – on which more shortly. But first, the big news: Tribbles.
“There will be a card for Tribbles,” he laughs when I ask, hopefully, if my darling fuzzy extra-terrestrials made it in. “We haven’t shown it off yet, and I haven’t said that to anybody. So that’s for you. The card design is one of my favorites in the whole set.” You heard it here first, folks. Tribble deck, incoming.
If you’re unfamiliar with these troublesome little xeno-furballs – first seen in the classic 1967 Original Series episode ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’ – the short version is: they’re absolutely adorable, but they procreate and multiply alarmingly quickly (the sort of thing that causes amusing havoc on a spaceship). Said rapid breeding feels like it’d fit easily into either a green, creature swarm deck (think Scute Mob), or perhaps a black, sacrifice-focused one. Which it is, we’ll likely find out very soon.
Naturally, though, there’s more to a Universes Beyond: Star Trek than giving the cutest and silliest aliens some airtime – and not all of it meshes easily with a TCG. “A lot of things map onto Magic really well,” Verhey tells me. “There’s great characters, great exploration, there are lots of iconic moments: all of that maps into making Magic cards really nicely.”
“But there was a trick,” he continues; “I knew I was going to have this trouble from the very beginning. The trick is that Star Trek is a lot more about dilemmas and exploration, and a lot less about fighting. Fighting does happen – you have your starships shooting at each other and quarrels down on the land, don’t get me wrong – but Magic is a game about attacking for two and removing your opponents creatures, so how do we make that work in a Star Trek setting?
“I built a set that has much more of what I would call build-up gameplay, where it’s a little slower, and you take your time to really build up into some cool endgame features,” he says.
He confirms that “Spacecraft are back,” and that they’re “slow and power up over time.” Then, there’s the Strange New Worlds mechanic, which “counts the number of differently named lands you control, so you very much want to let the game go on, get a lot of lands, and specifically seek out new worlds”.
Verhey’s favorite element of the Star Trek set, however, is its Dilemmas, which he admits Wizards had to “bend the rules to make happen.” While we’ve seen various choice cards throughout the years – mechanics where “you choose thing A or thing B” – Verhey says Dilemmas are designed to force you to care about the decisions you make.
As an example, he uses the already-previewed card for Star Trek Voyager’s Seven of Nine. Marked with ‘Face a Dilemma,’ this card’s effect triggers whenever you make a “modal choice” – i.e. when you choose one or more ‘modes’ for a spell or ability. In Seven of Nine’s case, whenever you Face a Dilemma, you draw a card. According to Verhey, it’s meant to simulate the thought process of “what would this character do if they were in a dilemma”. In Seven of Nine’s case, whenever you Face a Dilemma, you draw a card.
“Seven of Nine is always like ‘I want more information, I want to learn more’,” he says. “That’s very much her thing.” Hence, when the game forces you to make a tough choice, having this spandex-clad, ex-Borg civilian contractor on the field helps you out by granting extra intel and tactical options in the form of card draw. This tracks.
“We built a deck that you’ve never got to build before using these choice cards; one that cares about your choices,” Verhey explains. “It’s a very unique blend that you’ve never really seen,” he says, adding the system is also “backwards compatible: whether you care about setting phasers to stun or kill, or you want to go back to Vision Charm 29 years ago, you have the option to do that”.
Magic: The Gathering’s Star Trek Universes Beyond set launches on Friday, November 13. It features four Commander Decks (We Are The Borg, Klingon Fury, Federation Fleet, and Landing Party), alongside various Collector Boosters and bundles. You can pre-order it here.
Alternatively, come aboard the free Wargamer Discord community and hype with us about it. Tell transporter chief O’Brien I sent you.
Source: Wargamer
